WARNING: This article includes graphic scenes that may not be suitable for younger audiences.

If you are a regular reader of Strumpette, you’re acutely aware of what lengths we’ll go to get at the truth. This is arguably our most extreme.

You know how in a debate with a social media evangelist or blog booster, you just don’t seem to get anywhere? Arguments tend to go around in circles always returning to the same libertarian platitudes: the "democratization" of information is a universal good; customers (Jarvis’ 6 million pitchfork and torch bearing mob) are in control; there’s wisdom in crowds; hierarchies are all bad; intellectual property stifles creativity; anyone over 30 or in a suit is inherently evil and doesn’t “get it.” Their beliefs seem almost totally intractable.

Well, as we’ve concluded here many times, in the words of Woody Allen, “It’s nothing a fistful of Prozac and a baseball bat couldn’t cure.” It was in that spirit that we recently decided to set up an experiment. We wanted to see if a social media evangelist could be “deprogrammed,” so to speak. Could we actually stop their various proselytizing and return them to reality, or are they hopelessly lost forever.

Of course, our first challenge was to kidnap a noted blogger. This was no easy task. Not surprisingly, people like Stowe Boyd, Todd Defren, Robert French, Chris Heuer, Kami Huyse, Shel Israel, Joe Jaffe, Jeff Livingston, et al., don’t get out much except for high visibility conferences that include wifi, free drinks and appetizers. But we were able to corner one 24-year-old Justin Neville (screen name “Jingles”) while recently out walking “Betty Davis,” his parents' cockapoo. After a brief struggle with Betty, we had Jingles bound and gagged (pictured right above). We threw him into the trunk of our limo and headed back to Image Factory HQ.

Now, before we get into the whole debate about waterboarding, etc., NOTE: the electrodes we had attached to Jingles’ wee privates were mostly for show. Fact is: there are no 220v outlets in our lunch room.

That said, before passing out, Jingles opened up and admitted to the following:

- I never said I was a journalist. I never claimed to check facts! I’m expressing my opinion; that's all. I just say what I feel about stuff. And sure, if someone gives me a camera, what's wrong with that? It’s free speech. I’m allowed.
- Sure I recognize that democracy requires some system of checks and balances. But it's just not right for super delegates to disregard my vote.- You bet I use SEO tricks to puff up my numbers. Everybody does.
- Yes, I moved back in with my parents a few years ago but that’s only ‘til this all pans out. Something’s bound to break. Somebody’s gonna come up with a financial model for all this. I'm gonna pay them back.

It was at that point that Jingles started to weep uncontrollably. Heaving, he could not be consoled. We had apparently broken him.

In a nutshell, ya know that horrible feeling you get when you agree with the Web 2.0 boosters that this is likely the biggest transformation in the history of mankind... but then get that sick feeling when they openly admit they don’t know where it’s all going and you distinctly hear the rush of waterfalls? “Against the Machine” takes Andrew Keen’s much discussed “Cult of the Amateur” to the next level. Siegel more specifically articulates that inchoate malaise that we feel but cannot seem to readily explain. Siegel forces one to look at the Web’s destructive impact on our values, on our real communities, and most importantly, on our sense of self. John Lanchester for the New York Times captures it:

“[Siegel’s] indictment comes with a number of counts. Siegel argues that the Internet invites people to ‘carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style.’ In doing so it creates an environment in which everything is on display all the time, whether on YouTube, on Internet dating sites or in the blogosphere. This turns the culture into a giant popularity contest, an expanded and never-ending version of high school. ‘You must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else,’ Siegel writes. Thanks to the Internet, and to shows like ‘American Idol,’ we are encouraged to believe in a phony idea of interactivity, as ‘all popular culture aspires to full viewer participation.’ ‘Popular culture,’ he argues, ‘used to draw people to what they liked. Internet culture draws people to what everyone else likes.’ Siegel makes the strong point that ‘what the Internet hypes as connectivity is, in fact, its exact opposite.’ People sitting on their own in front of computer screens — this once would have been called disconnectedness or atomization. Siegel is blistering on the ‘surreal world of Web 2.0, where the rhetoric of democracy, freedom and access is often a fig leaf for antidemocratic and coercive rhetoric; where commercial ambitions dress up in the sheep’s clothing of humanistic values; and where, ironically, technology has turned back the clock from disinterested enjoyment of high and popular art to a primitive culture of crude, grasping self-interest.’”

Indeed. For some of us, all this Web 2.0 crap can’t get any more depressing. At least for a moment Siegel’s book will make you feel a little less isolated. You'll know there are others who feel deeply sentimental about all things meaningful. Then again, torturing Jingles was awfully fun.

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